Egypt Offers Advice To Renew Peace Talks

February 20, 1993|By New York Times News Service.

AMMAN, Jordan — In an effort to revive the stalled Middle East peace negotiations, Secretary of State Warren Christopher will urge Israel to use a judicial review process to speed up the return of a significant number of the 400 Palestinians it deported to Lebanon in December, administration officials said Friday.

U.S. and Egyptian officials said Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Foreign Minister Amr Moussa suggested the new approach to Christopher during talks in Cairo Friday.

Christopher is to arrive in Jerusalem on Monday after visiting Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

Under the proposal, Moussa and other Egyptian officials would begin negotiations to persuade Israel to speed up the military review of the cases of the deportees.

At the same time, Egyptian officials would use their influence with the Palestinians to convince their representatives that it is in their interest to return to the peace talks. The Palestinians have said they will boycott the talks until Israel fulfills the Security Council resolution to take back the deportees.

Christopher's role would be to present the Egyptian suggestion to the Israelis while in Jerusalem.

During Friday's talks, Mubarak accepted an invitation to visit Washington for talks with President Clinton in April.

Mubarak said Egypt did not intend to renegotiate an American formula worked out on Feb. 1 by which Israel agreed to accept 100 of the deportees immediately and the rest by the end of the year.

In a seeming endorsement of the Egyptian proposal, a senior administration official noted on the plane from Cairo to Amman Friday night that the Israeli-U.S. understanding includes a process of reviewing the merits of each case, "and that is what we would like to have timely decisions made on."

But later, senior administration officials denied Christopher would ask Israel to endorse the Egyptian plan, stressing that the idea was strictly an Egyptian one and that the U.S. was not a party to it.

In Geneva on Friday, the UN Human Rights Commission voted to appoint a special investigator to look into allegations that Israel violated international law in its treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories.

The vote was 26-16, with 5 abstentions. The resolution called on "Israel, the occupying power, to desist from all forms of violation of human rights in the Palestinian and other occupied Arab territories."